Black Sheep Sunday: The Greedy Priest

 

Well, now—it seems that my latest client is not the only one with a black sheep in the family!   After I posted “Inlaws and Outlaws” recently, blog reader Arlene sent in the story of her great-uncle, a priest who apparently didn’t take a vow of poverty.

Father Peter Gaborski (name changed to protect a certain elderly relative who might have a stroke if she knew about this) was a priest in a Lithuanian Catholic church in Chicago, Illinois.  The story opens in 1935, when an elderly man within Father Peter’s sphere of influence died.  The elderly man lived in a local flophouse—but as it turned out, he was no pauper.  He had sixteen bank accounts initially estimated at upwards of $90,000—which in today’s dollars would be equal to something like $1.5 million.  Later estimates more than doubled that number.

The man had a shady past, and according to a newspaper account (Alton Evening Telegraph, 3-7-1935), “Although he possessed a fortune, the ex-convict, James Thomas Kelly, 62, preferred to live in a west side flophouse at 25 cents a day.”  The proprietor of the flophouse, a Mrs. Butnam, figured out that her tenant was not the pauper he appeared to be.  She moved him from his 25-cent room (a price he had negotiated down from 35 cents) to her own home after she discovered that he was wealthy.  She then teamed up with an attorney and several others to draft a phony will.  In it, Mrs. Butnam became Mr. Kelly’s common-law wife, to whom he left nearly all his considerable worldly goods. 

Witnesses were needed—and that’s where Father Peter comes into the picture. The article goes on to say that there were two “witnesses” to the phony will—“Peter Gaborski, 48, who described himself as a priest and is a painter by profession, and John Dallyde, 54. The witnesses, police said, confessed participation in the plot, admitting that they signed the purported will after the death of Kelly.  They were to receive $100 each for their signatures.”

The undertaker also got in on the action, apparently to make sure his bill (an inflated $4,500 for a $98 coffin) was paid…  Altogether six people conspired to relieve Mr. Kelly of his estate.  But the forgery must not have been a good one; as the will worked its way through probate court, suspicion of foul play was strong enough that poor Mr. Kelly’s body was exhumed!  The Decatur Herald (3-9-1935) says that “Dr. Jerome Kearns, who examined the exhumed body, reported that Kelly did not die of cancer as the death certificate stated, but further examination will be necessary to establish the death cause.”  I’m not sure what came of that—but another article (Decatur Herald, 3-11-1935) said that Mr. Kelly—known in various newspaper headlines as the “Mysterious Miser,” the “Wealthy Hobo”, and the “Flophouse Midas of Madison Street”—was not the first lodger to die suspiciously under Mrs. Butnam’s care, and that toxicology tests were being run to see if Mr. Kelly had poison in his system.

Other beneficiaries included the attorney who drafted the will, who was to receive 6% of the estate, and the undertaker’s assistant, who was left 4%.  So, let’s review:  The landlady, the attorney, the undertaker, and the undertaker’s assistant, all beneficiaries of this man’s will…  Imagine that not raising red flags to a probate judge!

The two witnesses were the first to crack and confess to police, and after that, the plot unraveled quickly.  By May of 1935, all six were convicted on forgery and conspiracy charges.  According to the Valparaiso Vidette-Messenger (5-9-1935), the landlady, the attorney, the undertaker, the undertaker’s assistant, and the two witnesses to the phony will each received a sentence of one year in jail.

So here’s hoping that Father Peter learned his lesson…  I’m guessing he did a lot more painting, and a lot less preaching, after this affair. 

The Farm That Became a Church

Recently I’ve been doing some research on the Erickson side of my family tree, working with my cousin Gene.  We’ve found some good stories, including a real “black sheep” of a great-great-grandfather who I’ll write about soon.  But today, the story of my great-grandfather Karl Erickson’s farm, and how it became a church.

Karl (a/k/a Charlie) Erickson came to America from Mecklenburg, Germany with his parents, Johann and Caroline, and his brother Johann Jr., when he was nine years old—that would have been 1868.  The family settled in Will County, Illinois, where his mother soon died and his father Johann Sr. made a living as a farmer (although not a very good one), and later as a laborer.   

Karl and his brother left home (or were turned out of the house, some stories say) to make their way through the world in their mid-teens, and both brothers managed to do so.  By the 1880 census, Karl (by then known as Charlie) was a farm laborer on the farm of John Leppert, where a young lady named Lena Schmidt worked as housekeeper.  Carl and Lena married later that year and settled down to farm on rented land in Wheatland Township, Will County, Illinois.  Eventually they had ten children, nine of whom survived. 

Some years later (1903 to be exact) they bought their own farm, 160 acres in Will County which lay on both sides of Boughton Road in what is now Bolingbrook, Illinois.  They lived and farmed there until they retired around 1920 and “bought a house in town” (that town being Naperville).

But it’s the story of what happened to their Boughton Road farm sixty years later that is my main theme today. 

In the 1980s, a young congregation called Independent Baptist Church was looking for a property.  They purchased 18 acres of the old Erickson farm on the north side of Boughton Road—and instead of tearing down the 120-year-old barn, they remodeled it into a wonderful “barn church” in 1985, putting nearly 10,000 man-hours of volunteer labor into the remodeling.  The pastor of the church, David Shoaf, provided me with these old photos of the barn church—with the silo still standing proud.

about 1985

But the barn church didn’t last long...  On March 17, 1989 an arsonist burned the building to the ground.  Suspicion fell on a land developer who wanted the property to expand one of his projects, but nothing was ever proven.

Down but not out, the church rallied and built a new colonial-style church building on the site of the old barn.  Today they continue to meet and thrive at their church building on the old Erickson farm, 380 West Boughton Road in Bolingbrook.

One further note:

The old farmhouse, built in two sections (the older and plainer section visible on the right side, the newer and fancier section on the left) still stands on the church property.  The first photo below shows my great-grandparents, Karl and Lena Erickson, with four of their children, around 1910.  The second photo show the house in more modern times, nearly 100 years later—still standing.

Photos courtesy of Pastor David Shoaf and Independent Baptist Church of Bolingbrook, Illinois (www.ibcbolingbrook.org).  Old farmhouse photo courtesy of Gene Erickson.

Stories About Grandpa Sture

The other day I rediscovered some stories about my grandpa, Sture Nels Wallin, that my father wrote down many years ago.  I don’t remember much about Grandpa Wallin; he mostly watched baseball with my dad when we visited them.  So it’s nice to get to know him better through these stories, written down by his oldest son...

“Dad got a job as a hired hand when he was young, and was considered a very good one.  He was not big—about  5’8” and 160 pounds—but he was very strong and a great athlete.

The youthful pranks of his day were funnier and less destructive than now.  Once he and a friend named Freeman Larson made a big batch of pancake batter and fried several about half an inch thick and the size of the frying pan.  They used them with frosting to make a layer cake and sneaked it into the kitchen of the church party.  They found a vantage point to watch as a lady cut the cake, looked puzzled, tasted it, and called a friend over.  More women gathered, and he said the ladies ate almost the whole cake as each of them tasted it and tried to find out who had brought it.

(Pictured:  Jack Phelps, Carl Peterson, Sture Wallin)

Sara Elizabeth Peterson (his future wife) came to Hordeville to work in the bank, which is how they came to meet at a church social.  Must have been love at first sight, as on the way home Mom asked a girlfriend, “Who was that smart-aleck with Agdie Samuelson?” 

Once when we were small one of us asked Dad if Mom could run fast when she was young.  “I'll say she could,” Dad answered.  “I chased her for seven years before I caught her.”  Much of this was caused by WWI, as Dad enlisted the day after war was declared in 1917 and did not get back from Europe until late 1919.

In the summer of 1942 the hired man and I were struggling to load 100-pound sacks of fertilizer into a box wagon whose top was about 6 feet above the ground.  Dad came over, picked a bag off the ground with one hand, and in one motion one-armed it straight over his head and handed it to Butch, who was in the wagon.  He would have been 49 years old at that time.  He walked away without a word, and we quit griping.

Dad really abhorred pettiness and tiny revenges for fancied wrongs.  On the other hand, he took no abuse.  Once in 1913 when the railroad was being built, he took exception to a remark some lout on the crew made as he was escorting Mom past the drug store. He took her to her rooming house, came back and decked the guy—rendering him unconscious and knocking out some teeth in the process.  The next day the sheriff phoned and said he had a warrant for him and he could save some fees if he went to the courthouse in Aurora without being fetched—so he did.  The judge heard all the testimony and arrived at his decision:  “Guilty.  That will be a dollar and costs, and there won't be any costs.”   

Grandpa, I feel like I know you a little better now!

The Roving Reverend

Even a “man of the cloth” can be a black sheep...  Consider the case of Rev. George Washington Hays.

I used to be church historian at the church where I grew up.   One summer I decided to read all the board minutes, starting at the beginning—1858.  Not far into the project, my eyes were drawn to the word “alcoholic”— and I knew I had a story.   

Rev. Hays was born in Macomb, Illinois in 1837, son of a physician.  He was educated at Maryland College, then Princeton Theological Seminary after he gave up the study of law to prepare for the ministry. 

After finishing up at McCormick Seminary, he got his first pastorate—First Presbyterian Church in Aurora, Illinois, shown in this drawing—in 1863.  It wasn’t long before he married Elizabeth Hannah, daughter of a prosperous local merchant and church board member.  And it wasn’t long after that that the previously healthy Elizabeth suddenly died.

Biographical sketches from his days at Princeton and McCormick, along with ancestry.com, got me this far.  This is where the board minutes come into play. 

In June 1866 Elizabeth’s father stopped attending church.  He was warned by the board not to shirk his duty and to stop circulating reports that the pastor had a hand in Elizabeth’s death.  A hearing took place, pitting the pro-father forces against the pro-pastor forces.  In three days of testimony, the father accused the pastor of drunkenness, refusing to allow a doctor to see Elizabeth, hoping she would die—and giving her a double dose of morphine to speed the process.  (The attending doctor was another church elder, who left the church shortly after Elizabeth’s death.)  The board sided with the pastor and voted 3-1 in January 1867 to suspend Elizabeth’s father until such time as he repented of his slandering, which he refused to do, so in September 1867, he was excommunicated.

Nevertheless, Rev. Hays left under a huge cloud of suspicion in 1868—“leaving the church nearly extinct, having passed through a church fight that left it depleted in numbers and burdened with debt,” so said a church historian.   But what next caught my attention was the almost gypsy-like wanderings of the reverend for the rest of his career.

In 1868 George found work at two churches in  Carroll County, Ohio, where he married a woman named Harriet; they eventually had eight children.  By 1871 they were in Saline County, Kansas.  I found out by writing to his church there that he left there in 1873 due to a scandal; the board minutes said that they debated whether to contact the authorities or allow him to leave quietly, and decided on the latter.

After that, it was on to Henry County, Iowa until 1878; then Washington County, Iowa until 1881; then Scott County, Iowa until 1883; then Black Hawk County, Iowa until 1885.   

In 1885 he settled in California and his wanderings ceased.  Did he find peace at last?  Or had he simply put enough distance between himself and whatever he was running from?  For whatever reason, George stayed nine years at one church in Sonoma County and then seven years at two more—but as “pulpit supply,” not installed pastor. 

By 1903 he retired to a farm in Sonoma County he co-owned with his brother-in-law Horace.  Harriet died about this time, and in 1916 George died in Alameda County. 

I wonder what really happened to his first wife?  And what happened in Saline County that caused him to leave Kansas altogether?  Was George  a good husband and father?  What stories survive about him in the family?  Why did he wander from place to place?  More questions than answers on this one.